


Kick in the Butt

by rosewiththorns



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Colorado Avalanche, Discipline, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Non-Sexual Spanking, Non-Sexual Submission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-16
Updated: 2014-09-16
Packaged: 2018-02-17 15:07:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2313890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosewiththorns/pseuds/rosewiththorns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Matt learns the hard way that Patrick will always be there to provide him with a kick in the butt when he needs it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kick in the Butt

**Author's Note:**

> The fact that this bizarre story exits at all is proof that my bored mind needs the NHL season to start, and, speaking of bizarre, I tried to capture Patrick Roy's unique diction as well as I could, but I apologize that my efforts are far from perfect.

“We know he’s going to demand the most of us. So far, when we need a kick in the butt, we’ve got it from him.”—Matt Duchene when asked if Roy was a player’s coach

Kick in the Butt

“See here.” Patrick jabbed a ballpoint pen at the television screen in his office, where he and Matt were standing to review footage of one of Matt’s manifold defensive gaffes. “There you need to move your feet. Can’t be getting caught flat-footed. Speed too much of your game not to use it.” 

Chomping on his lower lip, Matt resisted the urge to clap his palms over his ears in a desperate attempt to stop Joe Sacco’s voice from echoing inside the cavern of his skull, accusing him of being lazy and not wanting to sweat to be the best player that he could be. Sacco had never been able to understand that Matt didn’t lack the desire to be great. On the contrary, his hunger for perfection consumed him so entirely that he would sometimes freeze because he was too afraid of what would happen if he made the wrong decision, and he would sink deeper into scoring funks by heaping extra pressure on himself to dig out of them when he should have loosened up to let the opportunities come to him. Chances were looking astronomically high that Patrick wouldn’t be able to grasp that about Matt either. 

Shit, Matt was even willing to bet a round of drinks that within a week Patrick would be snapping at Matt that he was slow and stubborn, as if Matt tried to be terrible instead of committing honest mistakes. When Patrick did (and it was inevitable that he would) unload that spray of contempt all over Matt, it would cut more than any biting words Sacco could ever have offered to the media (and never to Matt’s face, since that wasn’t how Sacco operated). Patrick’s fire to be a champion had stoked admiring flames in a young Matt, who had dreamed of growing up to be best, and nobody who met their boyhood hero ever wished to be dismissed as weak and lazy by their idol. That would be even worse than never getting to meet the hero whose poster you had stared at every night before you went to bed…

Matt’s talent for pissing even the people he longed to please off was apparently roaring into overdrive now, because Patrick had clicked off the television and was waving the remote in front of Matt’s eyes, which had probably been so far out in left field that they weren’t even in the stadium. “You gonna answer my question, Dutchy? Not rocket science what I’m asking.” 

Crap, there had been a question that he completely zoned out on. Time to go into damage control mode to try to avoid an explosion that wouldn’t be out of place in downtown Baghdad. 

“Oh, yeah, Patty.” Matt flashed all his teeth in a grin so bright that he hoped it put the sun to shame. “I’ll definitely do what you said.” 

“Yeah, you’ll definitely do what I said?” Patrick arched an eyebrow in a manner that prompted Matt’s overly active intestines to squirm like dying earthworms writhing in a spring puddle. 

“Err…well, unless it was bad.” Matt could feel his smile sliding toward the sheepish end of the spectrum. “In that case, I promise to totally not do whatever you said ever again.” 

Patrick studied him like a cat about to pounce on a rat, and then remarked, “You make a lot of promises for someone who didn’t seem to hear what I said.” 

Busted and blushing to the roots of his dark hair, Matt muttered, “Sorry. Maybe you should repeat yourself, Patty.” 

“Why bother, Matt?” snorted Patrick, shaking his head. “Waste time. You not listening.” 

“I will this time.” Rubbing the clammy heels of his hands together, Matt mentally hurled every profanity that a lifetime of hockey had taught him at himself, even though he was well-aware that his mother would gasp in horror if she could read his mind, and that his psychologist would assume a mopey terrier expression if he found out that Matt still couldn’t forgive himself for his endless errors without giving himself a good internal bawling out first. Clearly, he was just one of those miserable creatures designed to be an eternal source of disappointment for others who would suffer himself since he genuinely wanted to make them happy but just perpetually failed at it like the incompetent moron he was. “I’ll do better, Patty. I swear.” 

“I say you need to be faster.” Patrick’s jaw tightened. “Can’t be slow. Got to be quick and confident. If you do that, you not get beaten.” 

“I can’t.” Frustrated with himself, Matt tore at his hair. 

“‘Can’t’ a wiggle word.” Patrick tapped Matt’s shoulder in admonishment. “I don’t like wiggle words.” 

“It’s not a wiggle word.” Matt’s chin lifted defiantly, and he was sure that if his face were a door, it would have slammed shut at that second. “Just a factual statement of physical limitation.” 

“Not a physical limitation. When you want to, you skate fast as the wind. Being flat-footed is a mental block for you.” Patrick rapped Matt’s temples with his knuckles, not sharply enough to hurt, but still forcefully enough to cause Matt to blink reflexively. “Knock over the barrier.” 

“That’s easier said than done.” With an extraordinary exertion of discipline, Matt stifled an eye roll but couldn’t keep the snide inflection out of his tone. 

“Too bad.” Patrick’s azure gaze was as dispassionate and calculating as that of a doctor performing triage in a war zone. “Nothing except perhaps collecting paycheck easy about being elite center. If you want to be elite center, you have to do this.” 

Matt’s lips compressed into a line so thin it was practically invisible, since his was a naturally disagreeable soul. When somebody informed him that he couldn’t do something, his instinct was to demand why the hell he couldn’t and to prove to them as well as to himself that he could—that nothing was impossible if he willed it to be with enough conviction. By the same token, whenever anyone explained to him that he had to do something, even if it was for his own good, he was predisposed to retort that he wouldn’t just to spite them and to show that he would do whatever he damn pleased regardless of the rules others might attempt to foist on him. 

This obstinate predilection was especially powerful when it came to hockey. He was hell-bent on forging his own path even if that meant taking insane risks to reap enormous rewards or retreating inside himself when everything around him on the ice became too overwhelming for him to find the strength to move forward anywhere but the sanctuary of his mind. Of course, not being a total imbecile, he had noticed that his headstrong personality meant he made more errors than someone like Gabe, who was content to absorb the advice and experience of others without much in the way of critical questioning, but at least Matt figured that the mistakes he learned from were his own bad choices, rather than anybody else’s. 

“Maybe I won’t.” Feeling like a bastion preparing for an impending siege, Matt folded his arms across his chest. “Maybe you can’t make me.” 

“Maybe I give you a hard kick in the butt to make you remember how to behave.” Patrick’s eyes gleamed in a manner that somehow reminded Matt, whose skin and blood suddenly felt as icy as they would if he had gone skinny dipping in the Arctic Ocean, of the menacing, camouflaged underbelly of a Great White Shark. “Don’t for one second doubt me, Dutchy. Just because I pat you on back most of time doesn’t mean I not know how to kick your butt, too.”

“What are you going to do?” scoffed Matt. Although Sacco had provided him with an impressive education in the myriad methods by which a coach could inflict punishment and trauma on a player, Matt had to prod anyway. The callous part of him that had been ready to be scarred in the mind and the heart just to remain in Colorado to fulfill the romance of keeping a childhood dream alive needed him to become stronger by surviving whatever the worst was that Patrick could thrust upon him. He would become the best he could be by having his coaches chop off whatever dead wood was in him. “Spank me?” 

“That—“ Face as grim as granite, Patrick grabbed Matt’s elbow, spun him around, and landed a stinging swat to his backside before Matt could process what was transpiring—“might be the best idea you had all day. Not saying much, but—“ Another scorching blow struck beneath the first and only the theory that attempting to cover his butt would be about all that was left on the planet that could possibly make his current pose more humiliating and childish prevented Matt from reaching back to shield his bottom with his hands—“we give it a shot.” 

“It was a terrible idea.” Matt gritted his teeth, thinking that Patrick was as crazy to do this as he had been to suggest it even in the most sarcastic tone known to mankind. Now his butt was going to pay the piper for the fact that both of them had bigger tempers than brains. “You can feel free to stop now.” 

“I decide when I stop.” Patrick’s palm, which felt as heavy as iron, continued to hammer away at Matt’s rump, which was starting to feel tender and hot like a throbbing bruise. “You need to listen, Matt. Not listening is why you’re getting a good kick in the ass.”

“I’m listening.” Gasping, Matt squashed the temptation to squirm away from the hand that was burning a trail across his rear, because he wasn’t a wimp who cringed from his punishment even if it was the very definition of cruel and unusual. “Promise.” 

“When I say you need to be better at something, you got to work hard at it.” Patrick emphasized this order with a whack that contained enough inertia to send Matt shooting onto his tiptoes. Steadying Matt with a firm grip on his elbow, Patrick continued, applying three more smacks that were just as forceful in rapid succession, “Do your best, and I won’t get mad at you. Tell me you won’t work your butt off, and I’ll kick it for you.” 

“You can’t break me.” Staring at the wall to lock the tears stinging at the banks of his eyes from streaming down his cheeks like salty rivers, Matt added fiercely, wondering why every coach wanted to tame him when he was a hawk that couldn’t hunt or soar with clipped wings and talons, “Sacco couldn’t, and you can’t either.” 

“Don’t want to break you, Dutchy.” Patrick’s voice softened, but the hand that cracked down on Matt’s backside didn’t. “Want to teach you. Want to help you become the best elite center you can be. Want to work with you. That means you got to listen to me. That means you can’t fight me. Got it?” 

“Definitely.” Matt bit down on the knuckles of a clenched fist to hold a dry sob in his mouth, because his pride wouldn’t allow him to become a total twitching wreck in front of a childhood hero, who, it turned out, had only been trying to help him, and whose overtures of assistance he had rejected in the most insolent fashion possible. God damn him to the seventh circle of hell, he deserved whatever humiliation he received after being such a disrespectful, stubborn jerk with an inflated ego and bloated head. “I’m sorry, Patty. Really. Please believe me.” 

“I do,” answered Patrick, his husky tone resounding in his sinuses as if he had a cold, and Matt realized with a jolt that the hand that had been igniting a bonfire in his bottom was now massaging out the knots coiled in his back. “Now turn around and look at me.” 

“I can’t.” Matt’s whisper was such a shaky breeze that he didn’t know whether Patrick could hear it, or if he even wanted his coach to detect his words. After all, it had been Matt’s insistence that he couldn’t obey one of Patrick’s instructions that had gotten him into this mess in the first place. He was obviously so obdurate that even after a literal beat-down from a coach, he couldn’t just follow a simple command without his cursed ego getting in the way and tripping him. “Please don’t make me, Patty.” 

“I understand, Matt.” Wry humor slid into Patrick’s words as his hands traveled up to squeeze Matt’s shoulder. “You had your head up your ass, so I had to give you a hard kick in the butt, and now you don’t want to look at me.” 

“Yep, that about sums it up.” Matt tried and failed to rub the furrows out of his forehead. “I was a total asshole. I’m just too stubborn for my own good.” 

That’s what his psychologist said in more clinical terms, but the phrasing didn’t matter. Only the immovable truth of his stubbornness did. 

“Your stubbornness good if channeled correctly,” replied Patrick, and Matt could practically hear his smile even though he still wasn’t about to risk a glance at his coach for fear that he might evaporate into a pool of tears. “All the greats were stubborn. Some loud-mouthed stubborn like Messier, and some quiet stubborn like Yzerman, but all stubborn. To be great you have to be strong enough to not waver from your goal but also flexible enough to adapt different strategies to get what you want.”

“My mind gives me all the flexibility of a strait jacket.” Mouth twisting upward bitterly, Matt thought that his psychologist would warn him to lay off the negative self-talk, but the problem was once he began poking holes in himself, he persisted in doing so until he was as porous as a sponge. Every flaw he found just created the next the way deadly cancer cells spawned one another. “You just saw that’s what’s wrong with me, and now you must hate me just like Sacco did.” 

“Sacco didn’t hate you. He just didn’t have a clue how to handle you, Matt.” Patrick ruffled Matt’s hair. “As for me, I could never hate you. Sure, I get angry with you when you don’t work hard, but that’s because I care about you and want you to be the best you can. When I get angry at something you do, we talk like now, we solve problem, and then we move on together. There’s no resentment. There’s no hate.” 

Matt was certain that his psychologist would describe that as a perfect example of a constructive, open relationship, but he wasn’t so sure that his psychologist would define Patrick spanking him as mentally or emotionally healthy. 

“Are you going to—you know—spank me again, Patty?” asked Matt, reflecting that his psychologist would at least be proud of him for managing to choke out a word that it was so difficult for him to say, as he finally gathered the courage to twist around and face the idol who had become his coach. 

“That’s up to you, Dutchy.” Dimples flashed in the corners of Patrick’s cheeks as his lips quirked. “You issue a particular challenge, and I respond in a certain way. Ball’s in your court, as they say.” 

“Oh, right.” Eyes widening in an epiphany, Matt chuckled ruefully. “I don’t think I’ll be offering that particular sassy comeback again any time soon, Patty, since I know that you’ll shove it up my ass.” 

“See, Matt, you’re stubborn, not stupid.” Cupping Matt’s chin, Patrick concluded in an almost prophetic manner, “You don’t continue to beat your head against brick wall over and over. That how I know you be my elite center.”


End file.
